While cooking fiber, beating pulp, and forming sheets, we listened to one another's stories. And as we attended to the fiber's needs we came to know intuitively just when to put out a hand to catch a dripping felt or how to move to remain perfectly in sync. We lost ourselves in the ritual of making things together and built our friendship on attention to materials. A few years passed, and we moved apart but kept in touch, periodically sending each other updates and images. Despite being out of regular contact, uncanny parallels showed up in our work. For example, after making watermarked sheets with shorthand forms, I discovered that Kate and Lee had used the same kind of glyphs in a letterpress project. Eventually we decided to collaborate. As Lee points out, it seemed natural that we would make things together because we always had. As we prepared for the first show, we decided to ritualize our connection in a tactile way through letter writing. We lived too far apart to meet often, so for a year we corresponded regularly, using mostly handmade paper and enclosing not only ideas but materials, colored swatches, drawings, and other inspirations that could be folded into an envelope. Since we had all worked with shorthand, we chose the title of the show from a pair of successive phrases in a 1902 copy of The Gregg Shorthand Phrase Book. Shorthand glyphs, of words such as "ephemeral," "process," and "paper" became part of our visual language, and their looping forms started to suggest other connecting structures such as garlands, vines, or crochet. Our papermaking background led us to explore the transformation of other materials at the level of the fiber structure. For example, muslin scraps leftover from making one garland were beaten into fine pulp for embedding handwriting into sheets of kozo. Through each manifestation our ideas evolved. We saved most of the material from the Pyramid installation but wanted to use it differently in the larger space at Grinnell. Since the book had been completed in the meantime, we thought of the walls at the Faulconer as enormous pages on which elements that were extremely subtle in the book would appear 12 feet high. We made new pieces and revisited old ones. For example, a series of shorthand glyphs cut out of handmade flax that were hung in a cloudlike form in the Pyramid show were pasted to the walls to form a horizon line at Grinnell. During the installation, we realized we had developed our own "shorthand" for the forms we were using and their connections. Like making paper, collaboration has become a ritual that helps us in our personal work as well. Kind Favor Kind Letter looks like each of our work and yet like nothing any of us would have done alone. The artist book Kind Favor Kind Letter is available from Pyramid Atlantic: www.pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. Ed.
